Archive for Cataclysm

I’ve been obsessed with getting the achievement, Stood in the Fire for about a year now. I camped places Deathwing was known to visit, I leveled archeology on two characters and still, nothing. These are screen shots from the last three days in Uldum. I don’t know if this is a fluke or a sign of things to come, like really soon.

Deathwing seems really put out about something. Some of my gatherer characters have been turned into crispy critters multiple times. Could this be seen as a harbinger of 4.3, is he upset about the discovery of Pandaria?

I felt a certain responsibility since in my last post I had a link to the new 4.2 quests. I’m sure for most my warning’s too late or in a lot of cases you already knew this but I didn’t. It appears that disabling auto targeting doesn’t really work.

I wanted to do the Elemental Bonds quest chain immediately after the servers came up. I told myself it would be a bad idea but then I thought nah, my server is practically empty, it’s now displaying as “New Players” on the server list, it’ll be fine.

It was crowded but fine up until Elemental Bonds: Doubt. I’m on a PvE server so you guys on PvP servers have a good laugh, yes I’m a sissy, not used to being ganked. I was horrified to see nothing but a mass of flagged bodies and once in a while a glimpse of what I was supposed to be killing.

I thought, this can’t be good but I’m not leaving. I’ll just turn off auto targeting, be sure I don’t use Swipe and it’ll be fine. It was so NOT fine. I think I was flagged within a few seconds.

I was having bad lag spikes, I don’t know if that contributed in any way but I immediately had some hunters pet beating the crap out of me. I thought I’d ignore it as maybe it was accidental but hey there’s only so much crap-beating I can take so I killed his pet.

The hunter, apparently driven insane by the loss of his trusty companion who did manage a speedy recovery, proceeded to ignore the quest and hunt me down. Fine, I’m sorry, I REALLY didn’t want to kill your pet so if it makes you feel better kill me. Get it out of your system. There, all better?

Nooooo, he was not all better. Dude, seriously, just kill me once, that’s more than enough payback, really. Not so, I finally went and hid until my five minutes were up. Stop making chicken sounds at me. Look, if I were good at PvP, I’d be out there kicking all y’alls butts but in truth I really suck so I hid.

I continued to get flagged through the rest of the quests, patiently waiting for someone to kill me so I could get on with the quest, geez … so just wanted to give you a heads up, if you haven’t done it yet put your dancing shoes on.

Returning to Stormwind badly beaten BUT with a nice new cloak, I found something to cheer me up after my pathetic PvP showing, yeah, I only managed to kill … one pet. Nevermind, moving on, what did I find?

Yay! A free pet quest! Just go to Cathedral Square and look for Vin, she’s kind of in the lower right corner and she’ll give you Blown Away. You’ll get a balloon pet on completion and you’ll up your companion pet count. It might even ease your bruised ego if like me you just got the crap beat out of you. Oh, and go buy yourself a Strawberry Ice Cream, it helps … a little, sniff.

This week’s Shared Topic is from Ringo Flinthammer. What keeps you coming back?Despite a well-publicized dip in subscriber numbers, most WoW players have stuck around. But those folks didn’t leave for no reason, so what keeps you coming back and still playing?

There sure are signs that all is not well in the World of Warcraft. For example, what’s wrong in the picture above? Yes, Whiptail, just sitting there up for grabs. I was mucking about there forever trying to get my pony in just the right position for the screen shot and nobody flew down to get it, need I say more?

I don’t really know if Cataclysm was the culprit or just 5+ years of playing WoW, whatever it is I was unhappy. Not unhappy enough to un-sub but unhappy enough to see if Rift might be a replacement. It wasn’t, I came back and I do know why. I like living here. I’ve read all the books, I keep up with the lore and I just want to keep living in Azeroth. This has happened before.

I read George R. R. Martin incredible novels when they came out. I wanted so badly to live in the Seven Kingdoms. I wanted a Dire Wolf at my side. I wanted to be crew on the Starship Enterprise, the list goes on. But no where but WoW have I been able to do this successfully.

I can’t give up Feralas, Tanaris, Nagrand, Darnassus, Ironforge, Uldum, I am just not ready to. So, I have to make my own fun. I grew up an only child so maybe it comes easy to me, that or it just doesn’t take much to entertain me.

I’ve rediscovered my Toggle Run/Walk key. I fly to out of the way places I like, use Iron Boot Flask and slowly parade around. I make money so I can see just how well dressed I can get my characters with only homemade clothes and BOEs. I took my pony to see Uldum, oh and I fish. Nothing terribly exciting but I’m just not done living here yet. And woe to anyone who pulls the plug before I’m ready to leave.

I want to thank Jaedia’s Menagerie for posting about the pony creator. I went straight over there to make my new mount and then took her to Uldum. There is some kind of a bug though, she’s not showing up in the companion pet count, I’ll have to put in a ticket about that.

The last time I posted I was in a snit and did nothing but whine so I thought I’d better take a little break. What did I do on my break? The final Rift beta and I really enjoyed it. I loved the public groups when battling rifts and I do like the incredible range of customization available when building your character but in my case it would probably mean a bazillion alts as I’d want to try most everything.

I don’t know when the change above took place but when I logged back into WoW I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Phosphorescent Stone Drake has stopped dragging me around in the dirt, he now lets me ride up on top. I guess he was just letting me know who’s the boss and now feels I have got the message. This is going to save tremendously on armor dry cleaning bills.

I decided to work on a rare archaeology project and got another surprise. I know this is nit-picky but it was always annoying to me to have to get out of flight form to use the survey tool, and behold, I can now use it in flight form. Using it puts me in caster form but that’s fine. Another thing I noticed is that while my druid always did a little magical puff when changing forms I don’t remember every character doing it when getting off their mounts but they are now and I’m a great fan of magical puffs.

And while I’m on the topic of things that make me happy I have to mention the Thieving Little Pluckers. I have the feeling that I will still be doing this quest long after I’ve reached exalted with the Ramkahen. I do this every morning, first thing, with my coffee. I even stand there a while so I can hear them jabbering at me. I don’t know what makes it so satisfying to bonk these guys with that giant mallet but I could do that all day. I control myself though and only do my 30 little pluckers so as to leave some for everyone else, it’s right up there with Gnomebliteration.

Yep, this is kind of how I feel about things right now. I was brought up by a mother who had a lot of rules about manners one of them being if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything. Boy us parents can really do a number on a kid, lol. There is nothing wrong with constructive criticism but I have a hard time with it so I usually just keep my mouth shut.

Others apparently feel the same about some aspects of the game that I do, this, and this. There, they said it better than I could.

I don’t want to get into the whole mmo debate thing, yes, yes, multiplayer, yada, yada. Nothing about multiplayer means you have to join a guild. I mean when I first started I thought I kinda was in a guild, my faction. I had the idea that all the Alliance/Horde players were going to cooperate to accomplish goals like group quests, dungeons, etc., silly me. So I joined a succession of guilds and with one exception I still had no one to accomplish goals with. I still had to pug. I realized that since I played at odd hours and sometimes in odd little bursts with a lot of afk in the middle that the fault was probably mine, perhaps if I had been on in the evenings things would have been different so I gave up on it. I put all my characters in my bank guild where they will get no guild perks (okay, I lie, as of yesterday I’m in a level 2 guild) they will have druids flying past them 10% faster to beat them to the herbs and they will have to put up with that, sigh. My cook will have to come to terms with the fact that she will never be able to complete Iron Chef because the two recipes I need are guild achievement recipes. I might indeed be able to single-handedly cook 5,000 Cataclysm cooking recipes for the one recipe but there’s no way I’m catching 50,000 fish from a pool, just no.

I had already come to terms with not being able to complete anything involving raids and if I want to see the inside of a dungeon I wait til I can solo it. This is not the way I wanted to play the game but it has been a workaround that well, worked pretty well until now. I got by on the solo content which was fun, sometimes challenging and plentiful. I do not like the linearity of questing in Cataclysm. I feel I’m being pushed on a fast track to level cap so I can RAID with a GUILD the way Blizzard wants me to play the game. The solo content is no longer challenging, there are some great quests, Gnomebliteration comes to mind (my apologies, Gnomes, really) but it was clever not challenging.

I feel like a poor unwanted relative that showed up at the family reunion, a second class citizen, I feel that Blizzard doesn’t want my type in their game. Loner, misanthrope, join a guild and cooperate or get out of Azeroth. Some of the blue responses on the forums seem so, well, arrogant. It’s as if they are appalled that these sleazy little loners were having fun playing their game and are now trying to force them to conform, there will be no enjoying of the game unless it’s as intended. Okay, maybe it wasn’t intentional on Blizzard’s part, maybe they didn’t intentionally change their game so that it was less enjoyable to solo but it is for me.

I still love Azeroth, I’m still playing, and when I get in a place like this I usually make an alt, which I have he’s glaring at you above. Prompted by comments made by Ironyca and Döra in response to Will the Real Me please stand up? I’ve made a male character. I’ll let you know if he begins to cause my play style to change, oh, and I just pre-ordered Rift as a backup in case Blizzard starts hunting down us loners and expelling us from Azeroth.

I know a lot of people grumbled about not getting a vanity pet this year for wow’s birthday. I didn’t really mind as although I like free pets I’d at least like to do something to obtain them, I seem to appreciate the ones I have to quest for or get through reputation more. I’ve been happy to find at least four that can be had just through quests.

Withers is the reward for completing Remembrance of Auberdine I followed the comments posted by sunsmoon to get him. There are quite a few quests involved but if you are a high level it goes pretty quick. He shrinks over time but can be restored to his former size by immersion in water!

Brazie’s Sunflower is the reward for the last quest in a chain you can get from Brazie the Botanist in Hillsbrad foothills. What’s not to like about getting to play Plants vs Zombies in game. The last quest Lawn of the Dead took me a few tries but it was worth my Sunflower, the only downside was at least that character couldn’t play the game anymore!

The one I’m working on now is Pebble. The achievement Rock Lover, rewards you with your own Pebble after you complete Lost in The Deeps, rescuing Pebble ten times. Seems only fair I’m sure you and Pebble will become close after all those harrowing escapes.

I haven’t been to Vashj’ir so I don’t know if there are any similar quests or achievements to be had there but I can hope!

I don’t know what it is about Cataclysm but I find myself slowing down, not really in a bad way I just don’t feel any urgency to quest, to gear up, any of the things I did in past expansions. It could be that playing when all the other older players are at work or being in a one and one half person guild could have this effect but those conditions occurred in past expansions too and I did feel the need to level, gear, whatever.

It might be knowing that if I don’t race with the pack I will still be able to complete a zone because outside of Crucible of Carnage I haven’t run into any group quests so the need to be in the first wave so that there will be people to do quests with is gone. My poor warlock who was born in May 2010 spent a lot of time and repair bills trying to do the two first bosses in the Amphitheatre of Anguish alone to complete the zone, first boss was fine, second maybe eight tries, lol. The fact that new players will be able to complete a zone is nice, I like it, although I do miss the group quests.

Maybe it’s all the random flying around for Archaeology, I feel disconnected from the rest of the world, I have a whole other agenda now, digging up stuff and along the way I stop to look at the sights. I’ve never had the patience in the past to actually grind the mats when I wanted to make something. I have now, and happily I might add, personally collected 125 volatile airs to make two rings, I would never have done that in the past but now I seem to be happy grinding air for a while in Uldum then taking a fly around checking for the Mysterious Camel Figurine and then … just … fishing, yes fishing.

One of the changes I don’t like is the segregation. Were the Alliance and the Horde getting too cozy? With all the apparent strife in Azeroth (how can there not be with Garrosh Hellscream and Varian Wrynn in charge, I mean geez, two bigger hotheads you’d be hard-pressed to find) I guess we can’t get together in a place like Shatt or Dalaran anymore. I miss it, it was the only time I could /wave and /hug my friends that changed sides.

Is this just me? Is this intentional on Blizzard’s part, some kind of grand plan that I can’t see or is this something that just happens to you by your third expansion? Oh well, it’s off to that nice beach over by Schnottz’s Landing for me. I’m going to set out my umbrella and drink my South Island Iced Tea and think about it some more or not, whatever.